


The Woman I've Lost

by infinite_regress



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Books, Emotional Hurt, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Inspired by Music, Memory of Ace Macshane, Missing Scene, Post-Episode: s09e12 Hell Bent, Pre-Episode: 2015 Xmas The Husbands of River Song, Recovery, Reflection, TARDIS Floral Tribute, The Violent Femms, loss hurts but time heals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-26
Updated: 2016-03-26
Packaged: 2018-05-29 04:56:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6360253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infinite_regress/pseuds/infinite_regress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor steps out of the diner into the Nevada desert and back to the TARDIS to lick his wounds. There's a song that won't leave him alone as he reflects on the woman he's lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Well of Sadness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> This fic was written for Running_Still, who asked for a story based on the song 'Memory' by the Violent Femmes, with images painted by words.
> 
> I use the TARDIS 'sensory room', which I created for the story Post-Dalek Sensory Disintegration, (also posted here). Clara's clothes mentioned in the story are the Vamp dress she wore during 'Mummy on the Orient Express,' and the 'Red-eye' shirt is the one she worse during 'Into the Dalek'. 
> 
> Thanks to my beta Turn_of_the_Sonic_Screw

 

I step out of the diner, guitar strapped to my back and my feet sink slightly into the sand. The desert’s air ripples at me in waves but it barely bothers me. Call this heat? Try standing in twice this temperature staring down the barrel of a firing squad, that’s _heat._ I can see the TARDIS in the distance, and before I take two steps toward it I feel the rush of air at my back, and turn, and yes, the diner was a TARDIS. And the waitress? I must have been disorientated, distorted, misshapen: why else would I have talked so long to a stranger, about the woman whose name is gone, whose voice I can’t remember, who had eyes that meant something, and talked with that stranger about the cloisters? The image of that waitress is slipping away. Maybe she was sent from Gallifrey to see me safe back to the TARDIS..

 

Something sticks in my throat as I approach my ship. A floral tribute trails like tears from the top of that old police box. A sweet spray of flowers - orchids and roses- with a whiff of spray paint and pain, courtesy of local knowledge I think, gather in a well of sadness at the bottom. There’s a picture too, and looking at it burns my eyes, so I blink, quickly go inside and bang in the first co-ordinates I think of. As the time rota starts to rise and fall my heart pounds. Doctor Idiot, that picture was probably _her!_ I reverse everything, haul the TARDIS out before she’s barely kissed the vortex, and plonk her right back down where we were. I step back out into the desert, and the perfect wooden blue of the outer-shell greets me. I sink to my knees and grab a handful of the sharp petals of coloured paint from the sand. They fall, bitter-sweet, confetti through my fingers.

 

Later, I am standing in an old friend’s room. I can picture her quite clearly,19, fresh faced, hair scraped back into a pony tail, black jacket studded with badges: A NASA patch, a football, the Flower Child’s earing, all pinned in a haphazard statement that says, “this is who I am”. She has a baseball bat over one shoulder, and a back pack, no doubt with a few sticks of nitro-nine stashed away, over the other. I don’t forget the ones that matter. Not usually.

 

‘Professor? I’ve got something to ask you.’ Her eyes were terribly serious, and I worried a bit, wondered if she was working up to leave me. She shifted from foot to foot then said, ‘Do the Violent Femmes ever get back together?’

 

I laughed out loud, and swung my umbrella, offered her my arm, and said, ‘Well Ace, let’s get back to the TARDIS and find out.’

 

I made short work of discovery it’s easy enough to look these things up. ‘There you go, Sydney Opera House, new year 2015.’ She grinned, and of course I took her to the concert, like an eccentric and indulgent father with his retro-punk daughter, and thank the gods no one found the nitro-nine stashed away in her pack.

 

I pick up a dusty device from the bedside cabinet. After the concert I got her this MP3 player from the Virgin Store, and then didn’t see her again for a week while she holed up in here listening to the sound of the future. It’s good, thinking of Ace, and her fierce protective loyalty and how she grew and learned with me. Was the woman I’ve lost like that? I pick up the MP3 player and wander out of Ace’s room.

 

I’ve often pondered why the old girl saves their rooms. You’d think she’d recycle them into something more useful, like plasma vents or holding tanks for the dimensional out-flux. Maybe she likes to remember them too. I open another door onto an ordinary room with a bed and a dressing table, wardrobe and books on the bedside cabinet, but somehow it’s an earie void: blankness, so I know it’s hers. Did I come in here often? Did I sit at the end of this bed and offer her sage advice like I did Ace? I put the head phones on and fire up the MP3 player. I might just lay back here, rest my head on this pillow, listen to Ace’s music, and think of that mad banging concert again. I look at the track title, _Memory: The Violent Femmes_. When I turn the player on it rasps in my ears:

 

_I don't remember anything you said I don't remember any books that you ever had read I don't remember the sound of your voice I don't remember, but it's not by choice_

_So I wish I could remember something you had said I wish that I could read every book that you ever had read I wish that I could hear the sound of your voice I don't remember.”_

 

I flick it off. Hardly relaxing. I wander over to the wardrobe and open the door. A woman’s wardrobe, not something I have much experience with. Here’s a brilliant red shirt, peppered with electric blue eyes, hanging next to a 1920’s beady dress. I run my hand over the small dress, this woman must have been tiny, and the copper beads in the V of the neck are cool and spin under my fingers. A merry hem dangles at the bottom: these are a young woman’s clothes. I shudder slightly, flush hot, and feel a bit of a voyeur. I pull my hand away from the beady dress and take the red shirt off its hanger and fold it over my arm. This room is uncomfortably hot now, so I scoot out, picking up the three books from the bedside cabinet on the way.

 

I need somewhere cool to rest my heels, let my head stop pounding and the heat pulsing through my veins dissipate. The sensory room appears around the next corner. The old girl is trying to care for me the only way she knows how.

 

We spent time in here, hours in fact, I’m sure of it, me and the woman I’ve lost. After Skaro. Something happened on Skaro that terrified both of us, and it had little to do with Davros. I sink into the white leather sofa in the centre of the room, and plonk my gatherings beside me, red shirt, three books, MP3 player, like some intergalactic magpie feathering his nest with snippets of the past. The red shirt pools on the white leather: eternity has opened its veins and let itself bleed out.

 

Skaro, Skaro, Skaro, beats a punishing rhythm in my head. Then a white hot flash of memory hits me. _She was inside that damn Dalek!_ I can see it clearly, Missy crooning and prodding and gloating, and if I close my eyes and open the Dalek case again, maybe she’ll be there. To see her again even once would be a gift. I swing open that case, tell Missy to run, and I hope; but it’s just empty space with tangle of wires and degraded organic matter clinging to the insides.

 

I keep my eyes closed. If I just sit here, how long would it be before _I_ decay? A Time Lords takes a long time dying, and I’ve had plenty of practice. One final iteration of that infernal loop, only this time, instead of an infinite regression into hell, the gold light to take me to eternity. New face, new start, look forwards not back, but a voice brushes the back of my mind, feather light. Maybe it’s Ace, or perhaps Sarah-Jane. It could be Rose, golden hair half hidden under a winter hat, offering a concerned, ‘You alright mate?’ to a skinny stranger propped up in a doorway, in a brown striped suit with gold in his veins, who she hasn’t even met yet. Or maybe it’s the one I’ve lost, the never-giving-up one -I think that fits her- saying something like, ‘keep going, you daft old man.’

 

I haul myself up right and look around the room, and flick the MP3 player on again.

_“I can't remember your smile or your frown I can't remember the name of your hometown I don't remember the colour of your eyes I don't remember.”_

_Come back from that well of the void Come back So that I can tell you how I'm annoyed by the fact that...”_

I flick it off. A silk noose tightens around my throat and makes it hard to swallow, and my breath rattles in my chest. I clench my fists until my nails bite my palms. I am angry. Angry at Ashildr and the Time Lords of course, furious at myself because I remember all too clearly I broke every rule I ever lived by. Doctor peaceful. Doctor “I’ll never pick up a gun, but, oh, touch _that_ woman and I’ll shoot you.” Doctor hypocrite. I went too far and that’s why we had to stop. I understand that, but understanding doesn’t make it hurt less.

 

An echo of her ghosts against me, an imprint of her body next to mine, a sensory memory, maybe, and my hackles rise. It’s stupid, but I’m angry with her as well as myself. How could she hug me into submission and then leave me? The brief flare of anger fades and flickers into something softer. Yes, I think there _were_ hugs. More and more of them until I didn’t mind the hugging, until I craved closeness and the smell of her hair, apple and something I can’t place. Sensory neurones have a lightning quick pathway to emotions, and maybe that’s why I remember the sensation of her, but not the tangible things like colour of her hair or her eyes, or even her name.

I’m holding her shirt, I don’t even remember picking it up. The cool cotton’s hot red in my hands and blue eyes gaze up at me, steal a glimpse of my grief, illuminate my loss. Was she a thing as bright as this shirt?

 

 

I’m going to drive myself crazy sitting here like this, so I get up and pace. The wall in front of me dissolves into a swirling star field, the pinks and blues of the Crab Nebular. The old girl’s giving me something nice to look at. My guitar’s propped against the wall so I pick it up, and twang “Pretty Woman” into the air. It lances my ears and I screw up my eyes. I take a breath and find a softer tune, a riff that rolls into a story, more an idea than a song. I play a few bars and look out at the stars. How many of them did we spin around together? I play on, and wonder what this tune is.

 

Then it hits me. I think it’s called “Clara”.

 

 


	2. The Books She Read and the Lessons She Left

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The sharpness of grief fades, it always does. Doctor heal thyself, and go forward.

 

“Jane Eyre,” one of those shy Bronte girls wrote this. One summer morning, I forget when, I walked all the way from Haworth Village across the moors and up to High Withens and sat with my back propped against the derelict farm house, supposedly the inspiration for Wuthering Heights -I’ll ask Emily one day- with the wind in my face. I wore brown curls, a cravat and a silk waistcoat -I was a romantic back then- and devoured Jane Eyre in one sitting.

 

Jane, independent soul -a young teacher- struggles bravely through life and gets her crotchety but dashing older man in the end. I like the irony of that, and it seems Clara did too. She’s underlined a passage at the end of the book.

 

_“I had not intended to love him…he made me love him without looking at me.”_

 

I have eternity to ponder that. I put Jane down, and pick up “The Time Traveller’s Wife,” I haven’t read this. I flip it open and scan the inside of the dust jacket.

 

“A poignant narrative on love, loss and time”

“A heart rending exploration of arbitrariness, transience and plain bad luck’”

 

 _Really_ not what I need right now, so I throw it on the sofa and look at the third book.      

 

       GRIEF

   IS THE

     THING

           WITH

FEATHERS

   MAX PORTER

 

There’s a black bird perched on the word “grief” which confuses me and  for a second I see remember a raven swooping towards nothing along an empty street. I shake my head. Of course, she lost someone who mattered to her, she was healing herself. She wrote something under the flap of the dust jacket.

_“Danny, I promised I’d never say ‘I love you’ to anyone else. Here’s the thing, and I hope you can forgive me, I love him. Can’t fathom out for the life of me how to say it to him, but there you are. I think you will forgive me, Danny, because you had such a big heart. When you truly love someone you want them to go on and be happy even when you’re not there anymore”._

 

Thoughts rattle around my head like marbles in a jam-jar. Who does she mean? What did she say in the cloisters? Who, What, Why? I jab on the MP3 player to drown the rattle out, a compulsive twitch, pick, pick, pick, at my raw wound.

 

_"That I want to will you wonder would you wander back from where you are You see I see I cannot see But I've come so far with a little guitar And I play in bars and I'm lost in stars_

_Oh, come back from that well of the void"_

 

I stare at the white ceiling as the words batter my ears and my eyes prick. I think my nasolacrimal ducts are leaking, and my throat’s so tight I might have a malfunction there too. Oh, what the hell, I’m crying, hot tears spill down my face, choking reason. My shoulders shudder and I wind my fingers into the soft red shirt, Clara’ shirt, and the void calls. I can’t stay in this room, where we spent hours together, doing something, breaking the rules? Possibly, I don’t remember. I grab “Grief is the thing with feathers,’ to read later. It’s still open at the page where she wrote:

 

“ _When you truly love someone you want them to go on and be happy even when you’re not there anymore”._

 

Later, after I've devoured the feathered thing, and the heat gnawing at my bones has settled into an uneasy shiver, I find cards in my pocket. Not in my handwriting, so I think hers. Little lessons on 6 by 4 card, folded into my DNA now. I’m a better man than I was when I was new, not so tight wound or sharp at the edges, a bit kinder, and I think I have Clara to thank for that.

 

I drift back into the console room. I’m not sure how much time has passed. It might be a few hours, days or weeks even. I’ll slope off somewhere, lick my wounds a bit longer. I flick through the data bank and set co-ordinates for a remote human colony. The TARDIS purrs, a bit slyly and I see she’s landed me on 25th December. Probably thinks fairy lights and comedy antlers will cheer me up.

 

There’s a knock on the door. The universe just can’t leave me alone. Perhaps I’ll ignore it and slink back to the sensory room, slide again into that intoxicating place between memory and fantasy. More banging at the door. Real world or mind-palace? I glance up at the chalk board beside the book case. There’s a message, and I think it must be from Clara.

_“Run you clever boy, and be a Doctor.”_

 

The universe will never leave me alone and in truth, I don’t want it to. I’m going to open that door, of course I am. I wipe my sleeve across my eyes one last time and take a deep breath: Well then, _here we go again_.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Running_Still for this great prompt, I would never have thought of writing something like this!
> 
> 'Jane Eyre' and 'The Time Travellers Wife' we probably all know. 'Grief is the thing with Feathers,' is a book my Max Porter, published last year, and is a stunning bit of writing, highly recommended.


End file.
